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Post by dem bones on Mar 16, 2008 21:49:59 GMT
Hugh Lamb (ed.) - Cold Fear: New Tales Of Terror (Severn House, 1981)  Bob Haberfield
Marion Pitman - "Lullaby For A Baby Horror-story Writer"
Ramsey Campbell - In The Bag
Eleanor Inglefield - The Music In The House
Brian Lumley - In The Glow Zone
Ken Alden - The Papal Magician
Robert Aickman - Laura
Robert Haining - An Emissary For The Devil
David Sutton - A Little Bit Of Egypt
John Blackburn - Aunty Green
Kathleen Murray - All The Amenities
Adrian Cole - The Demon In The Stone
Charles Birkin - Dinner In A Private Room
Frederick Cowles - The House In The Forest
Arthur Porges - The Man Who Wouldn't Eat
Rosemary Timperley - The Darkhouse Keeper
Ramsey Campbell - After The QueenIncludes: Ramsey Campbell - In The Bag: When an unidentified someone places a plastic bag over his son Peter's head, apparently as some kind of joke, headmaster Clarke punishes the entire class with detention even though there's no evidence to suggest a pupil was responsible. But Clarke is a man with a guilty secret, and the incident has brought back unpleasant memories of the day when, as a ten year old, he played astronauts versus martians with the wretched Derek ... If I ever get around to attempting an 'RC - My Favourite 13' selection, this super scary tale is a definite. Adrian Cole - The Demon In The Stone: Dartmoor. Alan Steele and his wife Fiona invite journalist Ray Hammon to spend the weekend at the mansion they're looking after for Sir Isaac Vilegarde, a man with a huge assortment of magical bric-a-brac. Hammon ruined Alan's sister, jilting her when she fell pregnant, and thinks Steele is unaware of the fact. Not so. Steele tricks him into releasing the wind-demon by means of pumping up the stereo. Charles Birkin - Dinner In A Private Room: Something of a departure for Birkin in what seems to have been his final story(?). The modern-day incarnations of some of the most notorious characters in history are invited to dine with Mr. Nasat. Nero, Judas Iscariot, Cesare Borgia and de Rais are commended on their past achievements, but are reminded they could all have done better. Natas has decided to move into the movie industry: "We'll be showing the Nazarene as he really was, and that is as a failure and a two-bit agitator. He was a muddled and hysterical homosexual and those twelve disciples of his - well, we'll slant them as a kind of Touring Company for Gay lib. The Magdalene's a Pansy's Moll. Get the idea?" Kathleen Murray - All The Amenities: Martin Sower, self-confessed bastard and thief, takes his wife on holiday to a guest house on the advice of Jeremy, a partner he swindled whose brother hung himself rather than face bankruptcy. From the beginning of his stay, Sower is the victim of 'accidents' which see him scalded and stabbed through the hand. Are the females at the establishment merely clumsy, or is there a conspiracy afoot? Brian Lumley - In The Glow Zone: After the bomb, two-headed mutants survive on a diet of rats, cats & co. In short, anything they can find that isn't contaminated. Men come after them with shot-guns. The mutants fight back with axes but are eventually overcome as their mother had been before them. Ken Alden - The Papal Magician: Medieval Rome: A crippled priest, sympathetic to the Borgia dynasty, summons forth an angel when taunted to do so by a cynic during a pub argument. Unfortunately, it's of the fallen variety, and a decidedly unpleasant f**k*r to look at. Eleanor Inglefield - The Music In The House: cornwall. Archaeologist Simon Kent unadvisedly steals a prehistoric disk in some way connected to Sun worship. Ancient forces duly punish him for his crime.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 2, 2014 9:24:54 GMT
Arthur Porges - The Man Who Wouldn't Eat: Ledoux is unwilling to part with his prize posession, an original letter written by Napoleon to Toussaint L'Ouverture, "the lion-hearted Negro who liberated Haiti from the French." Knowing Ledoux for a gambling man, thoroughly unscrupulous Bryce Donaldson strikes a macabre wager involving the fate of a third party, Moreau, who is wasting away under a voodoo curse.
Rosemary Timperley - The Darkhouse Keeper: Lighthouse keeper Frank Valley is the last to find out that his wife Joan is having an affair with the womanising, vaguely saturnine Captain Markalon. Frank's job offers him the perfect opportunity to gain revenge - all he has to do is wait for the next time Markalon's boat is at sea during a storm, drug his companions' tea, turn off the light and descend the staircase ...
David A. Sutton - A Little Bit Of Egypt: "It is, Mr. Huysmans, a Canopic jar. The Egyptians used them to store the viscera of the dead, suitably pickled of course. The mummification process preserved the body. The Canopic jars preserved the body's entrails."
Mark Huysman, a reporter on Newlook magazine, travels to Wiltshire with his sexy secretary, Linda Carroll to interview a notoriously reclusive master of Egyptology. Charles Whitley Pederson, author of cult favourite Sphinx & Pyramid: Cosmic Double Act, is regarded by his peers as an archaeological equivalent of David Icke, his writings on ancient burial practices coming in for particular scorn. As the couple are soon to discover, Pederson has gone to horrible lengths to prove his doubters wrong.
John Blackburn - Aunty Green: Sir James Crampton, orphan made good, is dying of cancer. A multi-millionaire, 'Jimmy's childhood was one of prolonged torture. After his innocent prank with a cap gun did for his drunken parents, it was his misfortune to be adopted by the Greens, 'Aunty' being a sadistic fiend who beat him at the least excuse and threatened to feed him to the voracious, terrifying things at the bottom of the well.
And now Sir James has bought and restored the Green's old home, Wildmere Cottage - it burned to the ground on the day he finally stood up to his twisted guardian. Discovering to his joy that Aunty Green is still alive and living in a rest home, he gifts her the cottage. You bet he has an ulterior motive.
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Post by Shrink Proof on Sept 2, 2014 16:14:00 GMT
I read and enjoyed this some while back. I could never really figure out the cover picture though; for some reason it reminded me of the shower cubicles at places like Center Parcs where the swimming pools are mocked up to look like caves...
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Post by dem bones on Sept 2, 2014 16:24:53 GMT
I read and enjoyed this some while back. I could never really figure out the cover picture though; for some reason it reminded me of the shower cubicles at places like Center Parcs where the swimming pools are mocked up to look like caves... I always had it figured as an, admittedly fanciful depiction of a scene from Erkmann-Chatrian's The Crab Spider, except I just realised it isn't in this one. Ramsey Campbell - After The Queen: Robert attends a screening of something called Dummies of Horror at the local cinema, a lo-fi adaptation of A. M. Burrage's The Waxwork in which the macabre exhibits do their damnedest to terrorise and slaughter the living. As a grinning Marie Antoinette goes up in flames and the audience file for the exit, Robert has his first uneasy inkling that the action is not confined to the screen. |
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Post by dem bones on Sept 3, 2014 6:24:49 GMT
I do love revisiting an old anthology after the passage of upwards of five years. As with recent rematches, Ramsey Campbell's Superhorror/ The Far Reaches Of Fear and August Derleth's The Night Side, somehow Cold Fear seems even more impressive to me now than when our paths first crossed some time in the 'nineties. Robert Haining - An Emissary For The Devil: "I believe we live on the age of chaos. At any moment we are liable to be dragged headlong into that despair. No event is too trivial that it cannot be used by the forces of darkness to serve their purposes of destruction. It is our minds that they seek and through the destruction of our minds they will erase us from existence." Meet Simon Monroe, long hair, cloak, cane, bundle of laughs, etc., despised at his club as a devil worshipping desecrater of graveyards and an utter cad. Our narrator, Robert Sacks, cannot help but be fascinated. Eventually Monroe invites Sacks to join him for a night of wine and Tarot reading, during the course of which, the occultist solemnly reveals to his guest "the image of your future - le pendu" - the hanged man, dangling in wait for Sacks as he makes his way home through the park. Monroe's own card is more ominous still. Frederick Cowles - The House In The Forest: The origins of a haunting. Vienna, 1884. On reaching her sixteenth birthday, the elfin Annunziata Karoly is married off to Count Leopold Melkstein, a sadistic, hunchbacked lunatic of prodigious strength. The Count is at his happiest tearing defenceless birds to pieces, so all things considered, it is no surprise that the lonely and miserable Annunziata should seek comfort elsewhere, elsewhere being in the arms of the Crown Prince Rudolph. Insane he may be, but Leopold misses nothing. Robert Aickman - Laura: True, I may have missed a subtle subtext, but Laura still strikes me as among the most straightforward supernatural horror stories Aickman ever wrote. His matter-of-fact narrator's views on marriage are trenchant, but then they would be. He's met the ageless young woman in the flimsy dress and boots for every occasion, and life no longer holds mystery or hope. You do look unhappy. Come and sit by me. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 3, 2014 7:46:41 GMT
Laura still strikes me as among the most straightforward supernatural horror stories Aickman ever wrote. Have you read "The Waiting Room"? |
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Post by dem bones on Sept 3, 2014 17:58:08 GMT
Laura still strikes me as among the most straightforward supernatural horror stories Aickman ever wrote. Have you read "The Waiting Room"? Yes, but not recently enough to remember much about it. Am building up to a fresh attempt on Dark Entries. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 3, 2014 18:20:08 GMT
"The Waiting Room" is a ghost story so conventional that it boggles the mind. You try to tell yourself that there must be some subtle other point to it that you are just not seeing---this is Aickman, after all---but there really is none.
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 8, 2021 14:11:19 GMT
Laura still strikes me as among the most straightforward supernatural horror stories Aickman ever wrote.
“‘You do look unhappy’, she said. ‘Come and sit by me.’” An introverted young man who started off in a “ big branch” of a bank with ‘comptometers and outsize typewriters’ that I recall from working in places like that myself at the turn of the 1960s into the early 1970s. Which makes an irony, I guess, of the pet sematary outside the house where he first met Laura (surname known, but withheld, possibly Armenian?) a woman in her white boots that vanished up into her dress, a woman he fancies and who vanishes and comes back sporadically into the man’s life, a man who found it hard otherwise to form relationships. Until he meets her for the last time and she takes him down an endless corridor in an European building while he juggles with carrying a decanter of red wine and two glasses … a mode of activity and type of building that inspired much in Ishiguro’s great novel ‘The Unconsoled’, I say. (And someone named Laura Aikman (sic) now seems to have a Wikipedia of her own!) POSSIBLE SPOILER: On this final meeting, the man is taken along the endless corridor by Laura as if she is his guardian angel, eventually to a door in the wall, the space behind it arguably turning out to be his own pet grave? A space with “rotting woodwork, and huge worms, and soiled rags on the floor.” But what are the soiled rags, I ask? Any ‘mock-steak’ notwithstanding. |
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